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These Trippy High-Speed Photos of Paint Look Like Bomb Explosions

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Despite all that we see, the human eye still misses a lot. “When something drops on the floor we see it like a movie,” says photographer Marcel Christ. “We never see the frozen moments, and those are really sort of stunning in a way. Those are the things I’m looking for.”

Christ shoots still life photography, but that’s a misleading description of his work. The truth is, Christ’s photos are full of motion; we just see the fleeting moment he happens to capture. In his most recent series, Pario, Christ created mutating liquid sculptures that look like the universe exploding into existence.

Christ uses the same high-speed photography method for a lot of his commercial work. And yes, this is real coffee. Image: Marcel Christ

Christ has used high-speed photography to create campaigns for brands like Coca Cola, Adidas and Johnny Walker. You’ll see a splash of coffee just as it hits the table, a Johnny Walker cocktail exploded in air, a pair of Adidas cleats contorted into a spinning whirr. Pario is part of his more experimental personal work, though he says, “My commercial work is really close to my personal work.” Both are about illuminating moments that we wouldn’t otherwise see.

In Pario, the images were captured at 1/10,000th of a second, making them otherwise invisible to the naked eye. It’s hard to believe, but everything you see is captured in camera–the special effects are a result of manipulating the paint and water using compressed air tanks, but he’s secretive about his process.

“I’m not going to tell the secret behind these because next month it’ll be on every photographer’s website,” he says. He concedes that he times each shot personally, relying largely upon his intuition and eyeballing it. “There’s only one moment in time where something is really beautiful and that’s what I’m looking for,” he says. “Sometimes you’re too early, sometimes you’re too late.”

Christ likes to call this controlled coincidence, the idea that you can orchestrate a shot all you want but you won’t know what moment you’ve captured until it shows up on your screen. “It’s totally 100 percent experimentation,” he says. “That’s the fun of it.”